Occupying minds of economics students

Patrick Kingsley

Harvard economics students walked out of a lecture and joined an Occupy Boston march instead. Photo: Reuters

LAST November, 70 Harvard economics students walked out of a lecture by their faculty head, Greg Mankiw. Angry at the conservative nature of Harvard's economics course, they were suspicious of their lecturers' failure to predict the ongoing financial crisis and their unerring faith in the theories that led to the crisis in the first place. So out they went to join a march organised by Occupy Boston instead.

It is this kind of campus reaction that Kalle Lasn wants to inspire with his latest book, Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neo-Classical Economics. ''I want to light a fire under the economic students around the world,'' he says. ''I can imagine a few of them asking: How come we are still being taught the old economics? Why did not even one in 100 of you professors see the meltdown coming? It is an invitation to the students who get wind of the book to create a bit of a ruckus within the university.''

Lasn is the founder and editor of Adbusters, the very left-wing, very well-designed magazine that has railed against consumerism since 1989. Among other successful stunts, Adbusters has popularised TV Turnoff Week, during which millions try to avoid television for seven days.

Then there's the annual Buy Nothing Day, which is again fairly self-explanatory. Both campaigns go hand in hand with what Adbusters is most famous for: culture-jamming, or subvertising, which sees the magazine's team create spoof versions of well-known ads. It is also the organ that invented the concept of Occupy Wall Street, and Lasn is the man who first registered the movement's website.

Like anyone involved in Occupy, Lasn doesn't want to be identified as its figurehead or poster boy. He is proud of the movement's horizontal structure, and has been running from the authoritarian left since he was a child. Born in Tallinn, Estonia, in 1942, his family fled the Russian invasion two years later. For the next half decade, he lived in a German refugee camp, before spending the next two decades in Australia and Japan. Lasn made it to Canada in 1970, where he now lives on a small farm outside Vancouver, apparently padding to work in wellington boots. Before founding Adbusters, he made TV documentaries that critiqued capitalism. Yet he defines himself against consumerism, rather than with the old-school left.

''I'm not all that interested in the political left, unless it's this new horizontal left that's coming out of Occupy,'' he says.

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But Meme Wars is not, he stresses, a manifesto for Occupy, a movement often criticised for its lack of direction. It is nevertheless an attempt to do what Occupy could not: it is a radical economics textbook that Lasn hopes will spread the spirit of Occupy from the town square to the university campus.

The book is billed as an alternative textbook, and it certainly looks it. Adbusters pastiches adverts to satirise consumerism - and Meme Wars does something similar for economics primers. ''Darling!'' reads a subverted image of two 1950s lovers, ''Let's get deeply into debt''. Elsewhere, graphs that chart economic growth over the past half century are overlaid with ones that show a simultaneous rise in depression and pollution. While the text's content is pretty dense, visually it has the look and feel of a messy scrapbook or graphic novel.

Lasn sees three problems with conventional economics teaching. First: orthodox or neo-classical economics has brought the world to the brink of financial ruin. Second: by fostering a consumer culture, it has turned humanity into a selfish, anxious race. Third: it fetishises economic growth, even though this growth is ultimately destructive, since it both makes us unhappy and wreaks unsustainable havoc on the planet's natural resources. ''This is one of the most fatal flaws in neo-classical economics,'' Lasn says. ''We cannot keep on selling off our natural capital and calling it income. It's the most stupid mistake of all … When they measure growth, they don't measure real progress.''

The ''they'' to whom he refers is the economics establishment. People such as Harvard's Greg Mankiw, whose textbook, Principles of Economics, is taught in many universities, and which, Lasn argues, helps entrench the values of orthodox economics in the minds of each successive generation of economists, who then use their influence to maintain the status quo inside governments.

Lasn's modest hope is therefore to inspire the next generation to grab Mankiw and his brethren ''by the scruff of their neck and throw them out of power''. ''In a sense, I am calling for a scientific revolution: a revolution where the new guard - the heterodox, maverick people who have been sniping for a long time - rise to the top and finally create a new kind of economics.''

Once that happens, Lasn argues, a new crop of economists will emerge - ''and they'll become economic advisers to the people running governments all around the world, and bit by bit the whole practice of economics can begin to heave''.

As Lasn acknowledges, his hopes are not new. In fact, Meme Wars is structured around the thoughts of left-wing economists who have been making these arguments for years. The book features interviews with Joseph Stiglitz, and essays by, among others, Herman Daly and George Akerlof.

It uses these existing arguments to flesh out a new(ish) brand of radical economics that is humbler than the orthodox schools - that doesn't hubristically see itself as an exact, rational science, but a social one. Lasn suggests the concept of ''psychonomics'' (economics that take into account human behaviour) or ''bionomics'', which bear in mind the cost of environment damage.

There is no faulting Lasn's ambition. ''At the risk of sounding a bit grandiose,'' he says, Meme Wars ''is an attempt to do something that actually could put humanity on a new path.''

Of course, it probably isn't quite as revolutionary as all that. Behavioural and no-growth economics already exist as concepts. Ha-Joon Chang's 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism is just one recent book that also contradicts traditional economic ideas.